Seoul, Nov. 12 (Reuters): Alarmed at the use of camera phones to catch individuals in compromising situations, South Korea has ordered manufacturers to ensure that all new handsets emit a beep whenever a picture is taken.

one notable case, a woman used her camera phone to snap naked women in one of the country’s popular public sauna baths, and then sold the photographs to an Internet website. “New camera-equipped phones are required to make a sound with at least a 65-decibel level when a picture is taken and the function can’t be switched off if users change their phone to a silent mode,” the telecommunications ministry said.

Parliament is considering other measures to address privacy issues stemming from the intrusive use of camera phones and digital cameras.

Over the past year, South Koreans have bought more than four million camera-equipped phones and it is commonplace to see people taking pictures of their friends, themselves and just about anything else in view.

China jetset

Beijing (Reuters): Communist China, whose economy is soaring towards the stratosphere, is to allow its newly rich to own their own aircraft, state media and officials said on Wednesday. “As people’s incomes rise, private pilots’ licences will be as popular as driving licences in China,” Zhang Rongwei, an official at the China Civil Aviation Flight Institute, said. The General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC), the country's aviation regulator, will allow individuals to buy planes to“meet the demand of the market”.

Bold Brazil

Rio de Janeiro (Reuters): Ironically in a country known for skimpy bikinis that reveal more than they cover, Rio de Janeiro has balked for the past nine years at allowing a nude beach, but that is now changing. The city is “as famous for its natural beauty as it is for Carnival revelling with televised samba parades and belles in their olympic nakedness,” said one Brazilian judge. And with these words last month, he dismissed a 1994 ban on nudism at a beach called Abrico, ruling that arguments of immorality did not apply to well-behaved naked sunbathers on the outskirts of merry Rio. On a recent sunny weekend after the lifting of the ban, dozens of nudists filled Abrico beach, the city’s only nude beach which sits on a secluded strip of sand near the mountains.